Donald Barrett
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DONALD BARRETT PICNICKING WITH EM. FORSTER, JOAN LINDSAY et.al . When Joan Lindsay died on 23 December 1984, the newspapers energetically revived speculation on the mystery aspects of her famous novel: "Right up to her death Lady Lindsay refused to answer the question which fascinated readers: was it fact or fiction".' "Lady Joan Lindsay said of her book: 'I can't tell you whether the story is fact or fiction. But a lot of very strange things have happened in the area of Hanging Rock, things that have no logical explanation." 2 Phillip Adams wrote a feature article, "Joan Hasn't Died - Just Wandered Off in Time". 3 It has some charming personal reminiscences, and some of the points he raises are explored below. Most intriguing of all was the revelation of a "final" chapter. Joan Lindsay's former agent, John Taylor, stated she had passed to him in 1972 the manuscript of chapter 18, together with a documented copy- right, on the understanding that it was not to be released during her lifetime. He proposed to release it on a cassette tape, read by a leading actress. After this would come a commentary by "the world's leading expert on Picnic", Ms Yvonne Rousseau.4 Ms Rousseau herself confirmed all this and commented in fairly general terms on the manuscript, concluding, "In some ways Lady Lindsay outsleuthed me, because the ending is strange and surprising - a combination of three of my theories yet not any of them. Picnic fans the world over will not be disappointed". 5 The National Trust of Australia (Victoria) was also reported as having a copy of chapter 18 and to be taking legal advice about owner- ship and publication rights. 6 Later, however, the Trust acknowledged that all rights were vested in Mr Taylor. 7 Yvonne Rousseau has written a clever work of imagination, underpinned with a considerable knowledge of literature and philosophy. It is not primarily a work of scholarship. It presents several lengthy hypotheses on what happened at Hanging Rock. Each is well argued - and each hypothesis contradicts the others: (i) The girls have passed into another dimension of time and space (p. 39-56). Phillip Adams put forward a similar theory. 8 He asked Joan Lindsay if he was right, and she said he was. 9 Rousseau with her philosopher's precision is critical of Adams's version on points of detail and definition. 79 The girls have shed their human qualities, passed into a celestial domain and become figures in a supernatural, cosmic dance pattern (p. 79-94). A human magician is performing spells at the Rock - it is the mathematics mistress Greta McCraw! - and she and the three lost girls are each transformed into a natural object or creature. Miss McCraw becomes a flat rock, the one a bloodhound stood on for ten minutes, growling and bristling: Irma, a wallaby; Miranda, a swan; and Marion, a dove (p. 94-6). A reciprocal pattern is worked through: after the picnickers intrude on the environment, a counter-assault of forces from the Rock destroys them and, ultimately, the College from which they came (p. 99-13 3). An unidentified flying object (hence the drumming sounds and the rosy light) causes the girls to become lighter, gyrate in dance and go into a trance-like state. It then carries them off. Irma becomes discontented and is returned to the Rock. Rousseau anticipates that this explanation will satisfy no one. (p. 5 7-8). A "straight" detective version employs only human agents; there is no supernatural element. Michael and Albert abduct the girls and abuse them. Irma alone escapes; the others are mur - dered (p. 135-72). Rousseau writes: "With my multiple solutions, I may even hope to have convinced the unbelieving that solutions are unimportant - but not in life itself; only in Picnic at Hanging Rock (where the author's own ideas about life have determined the data)". (p. 173) Rousseau in a very learned way has done for adults what Bantam Books has done for children in the twenty or so titles in its Choose Your Own Adventure series. In saying this I am being in no way derogatory. It is useful at this point, however, to defer consideration of solu- tions and code-cracking and consider the various influences that may have shaped Picnic at Hanging Rock. Joan Lindsay was not only a writer but a professional painter. In the National Gallery of Victoria are two nineteenth century paintings which have possible links with the novel. The first is Frederick McCubbin's The Lost Child (1886), based on the true story of Clara Crosby, a young girl who survived after being lost in the Victorian bush for three weeks in 1885. The painting is a typical example of the way McCubbin introduced human figures into his early landscapes. Joan Lindsay in her commentary on the painting wrote: "In The Lost Child, the human element is strangely at one with the rustling silence of the bush". 1° Me That sentence virtually encapsulates the plot of the novel to come. When we come to William Ford's Picnic Party at Hanging Rock (1875), there can be little doubt. A group of fashionably dressed adults, both male and female, and children are perfectly at ease in the lush bushland that surrounds the rock. The scene is idyllic to a fault. The painting was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1950. Phillip Adams told me the painting hung in the office of the Director, Joan Lindsay's husband Daryl." He said also that Joan had acknowl- edged its influence to him. She herself wrote to me: "I had my first encounter with Hanging Rock aged about six - it left such a powerful impression that I didn't attempt to write about it for about fifty years!" 2 That puts the genesis of the novel in the early fifties, that is just after the acquisition of the painting. Picnic can also be linked with C.A.E. Moberly and E.F. Jourdain, An Adventure (London: Macmillan, 1911; 5th edn, London: Faber, 1950). Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain were Principal and Vice-Principal respectively of St. Hugh's Hall, Oxford. In 1901 they went to visit the Petit Trianon at Versailles. They saw in the garden persons and features that then appeared to be real but were afterwards found to have been out of keeping with the circumstances of 1901. Discussing the matter a week later, they concluded the place was haunted. Each wrote a brief independent account. After later visits and research, they decided they had been transported from the twentieth century and actually witnessed scenes at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In an Appendix Miss Jourdain claimed she had another transient feeling of "being taken up into another condition of things" during a return visit on 12 Sep- tember 1908. Phillip Adams tells me he wrote a laudatory piece on the book,' 3 after which Joan Lindsay spontaneously and delightedly told him it was one of the things that had inspired her to write Picnic. In this matter it seems safe to take her at her word. The essence of Moberly and Jour- dam's Adventure is their translation into another dimension of time and space. If Rousseau and Adams are right in suggesting this also happened to the girls at Hanging Rock (and they probably are), then Joan Lindsay's remarks about An Adventure shows why they are right.' 4 The most obvious literary influence on Picnic, however, is E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Here some background may be useful. When I first dealt with the problem of meaning in Picnic, I argued that the novel was pervaded, indeed dominated by Pan motifs' 5 These included a primitive, isolated, mountainous, "active" environment, 81 which had to be reached by an ascent, and which was able both to attract and to repel, to destroy and preserve; an intrusion into this environment; a presence that could be seen or heard, or neither seen nor heard; sleeping, dreaming, fainting and collapsing; passion, rage and madness; sexual tension; fear and anxiety; the prominence of noonday; tension between order and disorder, rationality and instinct. In that paper I referred also to a study of Joan Kirkby, which mentions "interesting analogues" between Picnic and Passage.'6 In fact, the similarities of theme are quite remarkable. Forster's Marabar Hills, a focal point of the story, are isolated, animate and even personified: towards sunset they drew nearer to the town of Chandra- pore; 17 boulders and small stones declared themselves alive or almost alive (p. 161); they struck their gong (a reference to the echo that plagued Adela and Mrs Moore) (p. 212); their fists and fingers enclosed the night sky (p. 249);18 they drove Aziz to love his native India (p. 266) and to believe his friend Cyril Fielding would marry his accuser Adela (p. 277); the caves were dark (p. 138); some had never been unsealed (p. 139); the hills shifted as the train went past; they were gods to whom the earth was a ghost (p. 149); for all their beauty, "they had altered a good many lives and wrecked several careers" (p. 238). The Hills were wholly primitive, their caves sealed from time immemorial (p. 139): the corridor around the Kawa Dol (the highest rock) had never changed (p. 153); the earth must have looked like this before the creation of human beings and perhaps even of birds (p. 158); the undying worm that lives in the first of the caves had preceded time and space (p.